The book offers suspense but nothing else.
A debut novel about an African American fugitive couple seeking refuge in Ghana.
It’s 1966, and Bernadette and Melvin are in Accra, Ghana, far from their American home. They’re not there for pleasure—the couple are on the run after Melvin, held at gunpoint by a racist White man outside an Alabama restaurant, grabbed the weapon from the bigot and shot him. “I killed a white man in Alabama, that’s the electric chair,” Melvin tells his fiancee. “They gon’ say you my accomplice.” Melvin decides only one person can help them: his old college friend Kwame Nkrumah, who happens to be the president of Ghana. When Bernadette and Melvin, pretending to be a pastor and his wife, meet Kwesi Kwayson, a highlife musician, and find out he’s scheduled to play a show for Nkrumah, they insist on tagging along, hoping the president can offer them protection. But Bernadette develops oddly instant feelings for Kwesi, writing in her diary, “I just met a man and it felt like an out of body experience. As if I had known him my whole life.” Meanwhile, an FBI agent named Hughes travels to Ghana, hoping to apprehend the couple he just missed arresting in the States. Bazawule renders the cat-and-mice aspect of the novel well; a filmmaker, he’s gifted at narrative pacing. Unfortunately, that’s the only part of the book that works. His adjective-heavy writing is stilted and awkward, and he makes frequent use of clichéd phrases like “The day began like any other” and overly expository formulations like “At that moment, he concocted a plan that would have far-reaching consequences.” In several passages, he takes jarring detours into magical realism that feel out of place, throwing the reader out of the narrative, and he indulges heavily in melodrama, making the novel resemble a bizarre soap opera. The result is a book that feels like a screenplay that’s been wrestled, awkwardly, into prose. This doesn’t seem like a finished novel so much as an underedited first draft of one.
The book offers suspense but nothing else.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49623-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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